PotentialPeople

Context : OnMorality

One of the things that I've always said and thought is that you clearly can't have obligations to potential people. Because if you did, not only would contraception be murder (something I don't believe is the case), but taken to its logical conclusion, even masturbation would be murder. And non-stop breeding would be an obligation.

The most obvious reason that we can't owe duties to potential people is that most potential people are mutually exclusive. If a woman conceives a child (and its entire lineage of descendents) with partner X today, that immediately excludes the possibility of conceiving a different child (and its descendents) with the same partner tomorrow. Not to mention any of 3 billion other potential partners she might have conceived with.

You could see this as the world's worst TrolleyProblem of course. With every choice you make slaughters not just an infinity of potential people, but a diagonalized infinity of potential people

And while I believe that it can sometimes be de facto impossible to do the right thing. I don't think it can ever be conceptually impossible to do the right thing. Any moral obligation which is logically impossible to achieve can't really be a moral obligation. And maximizing the number of potential people is one of those.

But these are the thought experiments that undoubtedly obsess pro-natalists, Incels and other avatars of ThePatriarchy, but shouldn't concern us.

The answer is simple. We owe nothing to potential people. Only to actual people.

At the same time, this makes arguments about "we should preserve the world for our children" also rather awkward. Why shouldn't I enjoy consuming as much as possible today regardless of the environmental devastation this leaves after I die, if most of those who will suffer there do not yet exist?

The obvious answer is that I owe the obligation not to destroy the ecosystem, not to the people of the future, but to the actual existing ecosystem today.